I have a (potential) customer who has a Bekum H-151 blow molding machine and they would like to update the controls. This machine is about 1988 vintage, and I believe it has been updated once. It now has an Invensys PC running wonderware for an operator interface, a SLC 5/04 plc, Barber Coleman controller of some kind, and a 75HP DC Motor Drive. Oh, and their is Modbus tying some of it together, some (Remote) Flex I/O and its basically a hodge-podge mess. The customer has ZERO documentation on this machine. Apparently they don't know much about their machine, either.

I have no experience with blow molders and would like to learn the basics of how this machine works. Does anyone have and manuals on this, or a similar machine, that I could look at? Bekum wants $350 for a documentation set.

Also, I'd like to learn more about the Parison control. If I'm not mistaken, there are 2, dedicated controllers, for this. What exactly do they do and would it be worth replacing them?

I'm trying to get to the point where I understand the machine enough to put an I/O list together, come up with more readily available components and create a proposal. The lack of information is holding me back.

I don't have any documentation to offer you, but I can answer your questions on blow molding machines in general.

The parison is the tube of plastic that is extruded, clamped, and then blown up into the part. The tooling that makes the parison consist of a mandrel and bushing. The gap between the mandrel and bushing is what dictates the wall thickness of the parison. (And thus the gram weight.) A parison controller, or programmer, is used to thicken or thin certain areas of the part during the extrusion cycle. For example, we manufacture plastic bottles and we would typically thin the area of the neck of the bottle while giving a little extra to the thinnest portion of the bottle. Typically all the programmer consists of is a hydraulic cylinder with a proportional valve controlling it. You can code your own programmer or purchase a dedicated controller. I believe Moog is one brand. If there are 2 dedicated controllers for this I would assume that the machine is 2 head? Anyways if you already have the controllers you would probably be better off using them.

Here's a picture of what I believe is the Parison controllers, towards the left side of the pic. I didn't see a nameplate or much description on it, which didn't help.

#2 Controller (sorry for the poor quality):
I see some symbols that look like some ramping of a value, I assume thats position of the mandrel or something. I assume these controllers get a Start/Stop or Run signal from somewhere.

It also appears this has a Barber Coleman temperature(?) controller:

Is this temperature control for the heating zones? And, nothing else? The customer wants to get rid of this and my thinking is the temperature control can be easily done in a ControLogix.

That was a MACO DS. It was a modular control system that can have temperature control zones, parison control, i/o sequence control. I believe that it is obsolete at this time. Modbus Plus tied it together to the HMI.

I have converted a Bekum smaller version blow molding machine to a micrologix and a microview few years back. What's a parrison controller does is adjust the thickness of the material at desired points as it comes out of the mouth. I have shifted heating and parrison to micrologix by using timers and it works well. I will attach the PLC program here. I am happy to help you, if u have further queries.

The VT3015 cards you showed in your pictures are usually used to control linear movement, the carriages up and down. I have worked on a number of different Bekum models over the years. If you are still having problems with putting together the I/O information, I can assist you with that.